Category: Drink

It’s easy to be overwhelmed sometimes, weighed down with dread, but spring is coming.

Of course, in this part of the world that means Mud Season, but there is a smell in the air, carrying the slightest hint of hope. What we need — OK, I’m projecting. What I need is a cocktail infused with hope, or in this case, peas.

Peas de Resistance

• 2 ounces pea-infused gin (see below)
• 1 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ¾ ounce simple syrup

This is a simple riff on a gin sour; the only difference is the addition of the peas — an important distinction, as it turns out.

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, shake thoroughly, and strain into a coupé or Nick and Nora glass. Drink blisteringly cold, with a sigh of relief.

On first sip, the taste that hits you is the peas. That doesn’t sound very enticing, but the natural sweetness of the pea pods plays well with the lemon juice. This is a mouth-watering cocktail, and one sip invites another, until you realize that you should have made two. Which might prompt a quick phone call to a friend and an impromptu cocktail hour on your front steps.

Pea-Infused Gin

A quick science lesson: Surface Area-to-Mass Ratio

This is a jargony way of saying that the more surface area a substance has, the more room it has to interact with chemicals — alcohol, acid, water, oxygen or, in cooking, even smoke.

Imagine an object — let’s say a cucumber. Think of the surface area it presents to the world, modestly wrapped in a dark green wrapper. Now, imagine cutting it in half, lengthwise. Suddenly, there are two large surfaces exposed to the World. All the original surface is still there, plus these two new ones, which probably doubles the amount of exposed surface area.

Now chop those in half, crosswise. You’ve exposed four new surfaces. They aren’t as large as you got with the first set of cuts, but there’s four of them. Now chop up the cucumber. Each time you cut it you increase the amount of surface exposed to — er — the Universe or something.

Which brings us to the pea-infused gin.

Pour a couple of cups of dry gin — I like Gordon’s for this — into your blender. Add a couple handfuls of sugar snap peas, shell and all, into the gin. Blend them for 30 seconds or so. Your blender (mine is named Steve) will chop them into smaller, then almost microscopic, pieces, greatly increasing their surface area.

Turn off the blender and walk away for an hour or two to let the gin and the peas get to know each other. The alcohol in the gin will strip away a lot of the color and much of the flavor of the peas. If you’re distracted by something actually important — your family, a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby marathon on TCM, whatever — you can leave the blender jar sitting on your counter for an almost indefinite amount of time. Remember: This pea sludge is at least half alcohol.

When you’ve got a bit of time, strain it. I like to strain it twice — once with a mesh strainer and then again through a coffee filter, which will take longer. Don’t stand around watching it; it will drive you crazy. Walk away and do something else for a while. Maybe go for a walk, recognizing that this might attract some sort of alcoholic Goldilocks.

When you’re satisfied, bottle it and set it aside until you’re ready to use it.

Featured Photo: Peas de Resistance. Photo by John Fladd.

I have a rule in life — well, maybe more of a guideline. Anytime somebody says that a low-fat or gluten-free or vegan version of something is “just as good as the real thing” I become deeply suspicious. That is almost never true. If it were true, that version would be our default for that thing.

But then—

The difference between ice cream and sorbet is that sorbet is made without any dairy. We usually think of sorbets as being fruit-based, but that isn’t always the case. I make a lot of experimental sorbets, because a couple of the friends I use as guinea pigs for my recipes are vegan. On top of that, it is Girl Scout cookie season, and you might not have noticed but Thin Mints are dairy-free and vegan.

This chocolate sorbet might become your default “ice cream,” and the Girl Scout cookies only intensify its awesomeness.

The base of this sorbet is adapted from a recipe from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz.

• 1½ cups (375 g) water
• 1 cup (200 g) sugar
• ¾ cup (75 g) cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-process cocoa, which has a slightly different pH than average civilian cocoa.
• Pinch of coarse sea salt
• 6 ounces (170 g) dark chocolate – preferably Trader Joe’s chocolate chips, which have a fairly high cocoa percentage (about 53%) and are also dairy-free
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Another ¾ cup (180 g) water
• ½ sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies, broken roughly into quarters

In a medium saucepan, combine the first 1½ cups of water, sugar, cocoa powder and salt. Cocoa is hydrophobic, which means that it doesn’t like to mix with water, so you will probably have to force the issue with a whisk.

Heat the cocoa mixture until it comes to a boil, then let it boil for one minute before removing it from the heat. Stir the chocolate chips into the hot mixture until they melt completely, before stirring in the other ¾ cup of water, then the vanilla. Most vanilla extracts use an alcohol base. Alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water boils, and by bringing the temperature of the mixture down with the chocolate chips, and then the water, you will keep more of the vanilla’s flavor in your sorbet.

Leave the mixture on your stovetop or counter to cool.

If you have an ice cream maker:

Chill the mixture for several hours, or overnight, then churn in your machine, according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

If you do not have an ice cream maker:

Transfer the sorbet base into a large sealable plastic bag. (Because I get nervous, I double-bag it to make extra-certain that there aren’t any leaks.) Lay the bag in your freezer, as flat as possible. This might require some reorganization. When the sorbet base has frozen solid, remove it from the freezer and break it into chunks. Blend the sorbet chunks in your blender until it comes together into a soft-serve consistency.

With either method, layer the sorbet and cookie pieces in one large container or three or four smaller containers. Return to the freezer to harden up.

This might be the most intensely chocolatey “ice cream” you’ve ever had. You might suddenly re-examine your preconceptions of what chocolate ice cream is supposed to be. This might lead you to re-examine some of your major life decisions. It’s that chocolatey. Despite not having any dairy in it, this sorbet has an extremely rich taste and a fudgy consistency. You might think the chunks of Girl Scout cookies will be overpowered and are just there for texture, but much like an actual Girl Scout they are not to be underestimated. They do the dessert equivalent of locking eyes with you and staring you down.

This sorbet is not kidding around.

Featured Photo: Chocolate Sorbet with Girl Scout Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

At the moment, I am working on a project that involves thinking deeply about a couple of cows celebrating a Girls’ Night Out. Never mind why. That just seems to be where my life is right now — thinking about cow girlfriends at a bar, laughing, drinking and flirting with a rugged beefcake of a stranger, only to find out to their chagrin that he is an ox. (Look it up.)

The obvious question as far as I’m concerned is this: What would they drink?

Initially the answer seems obvious: white Russians, or mudslides, or something with cream in it. But I can imagine the conversations the cows would have:

“Really? Drinking our own body fluids? Doesn’t that seem a little — wrong?”

Then there are obvious plays on words — moo-tinis, moo-garitas or moo-jitos, but I’m not entirely sure how one would go about making them.

Then, out of nowhere, as often happens when one opens oneself up to the Universe, I discovered a drink called The Nightmare of Milky Joe. I don’t know where the name comes from — there’s no dairy in it — but it sounded promising. After some tinkering, a surprisingly delicious not-quite-tiki drink came into focus.

Let’s call it —

The Daydream of Milky Joe

1 flavorful jalapeño pepper – it would be nice if it had some heat, but it is more important that it has good flavor

1 ounce golden rum

1 ounce dark rum

1 ounce sweet coconut cream – Coco Lopez is a classic brand, but there are other good ones, so use whichever one brings joy to your life

½ ounce crème de banana

½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

4 ounce grapefruit soda – I like Pink Ting, but Jarritos or Fresca would work well too

Roughly chop the jalapeño, and muddle it in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. (This means crush it with a cocktail muddler, a wooden spoon, or a small soda bottle.)

Add the dark and gold rums, then dry shake the mixture — shake it without ice. Flavorful chemicals in a chili pepper, including capsaicin, the one that makes it taste hot, are soluble in alcohol, but not in water, so shaking the crushed jalapeño with alcohol before adding any watery ingredients will help extract heat and flavor into the cocktail.

Add ice, the coconut cream, crème de banana, and lime juice, then shake again, until you hear the ice start to break up.

Strain the mixture over crushed ice in the fanciest glass you own, then top it with grapefruit soda and stir.

This drink is something truly rare in this weary world: a happy surprise. Rum and coconut obviously go well together, but the surprise comes in how much the jalapeño and lime add to this enterprise. We’ve established on many occasions that lime is everybody’s friend. It is super friendly with rum, and delightful with coconut, but if you think about it for a moment, it is also really, really good with chilis; think of a fresh salsa. The lime is a bridge from Spice City to Smooth Town, and the grapefruit soda is the water under it.

Featured Photo: The Daydream of Milky Joe. Photo by John Fladd.

Ice

Absinthe to rinse the ice with (see below)½ ounce simple syrup

3 drops Peychaud’s bitters

1 dash Angostura bitters

1½ ounces rye whiskey – there are some people who make a Sazerac with bourbon, but there are also some people who are horrified by that

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds of the way with ice. Pour an ounce or so of absinthe over the ice, and stir well to combine. Strain off the excess absinthe.

The idea here is to give a hint, a trace in the background, of absinthe. This is the same way many martini enthusiasts will use vermouth. Coating the ice with a little-goes-a-long-way alcohol, then pouring off the excess, is called “rinsing.” At first taste, absinthe tastes much like any number of anise-y, black licorice-y spirits, but it really isn’t interchangeable with any of the others.

Once you have rinsed the ice and poured off the excess absinthe, add the rest of the ingredients to the mixing glass, and mix everything thoroughly, but gently. According to the classic 1939 treatise, Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’em, you should under no circumstances shake this cocktail in a shaker. No explanation is given, but exclamation marks are used, so it seems the better part of wisdom to stir this like a martini.

Strain the mixture over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Traditionally, a lemon twist is manhandled brutally to express a drop of lemon oil, then dropped into the cocktail.

From time to time you’ll hear whiskey fanciers describe rye as “spicy.” Much of the time it pretty much just tastes like a slightly sharp whiskey — delicious, most of its spiciness covered by the raw burn of the alcohol. In a Sazerac, however — it might be due to the bitters, or maybe the absinthe is working some kind of magic — there is a definite kick of rye spiciness. This pairs well with the sweetness from the simple syrup and the herbaceousness of the bitters.

A Sazerac packs a punch. It is definitely a sipping drink. For New Orleanians, it is the Breath of Life.

Featured Photo: Sazerac. Photo by John Fladd.

Trinidad Sour

It’s easy to fall into a rut.

Ruts are comforting. They provide predictability and structure in a chaotic world with too many unwelcome surprises.

So it’s easy — for me, at any rate — to fall back on simple utility cocktails, made from three ingredients; four if you count ice. Some sort of spirit, something sour, and something sweet — this is the basic structure of a daiquiri, a gimlet, a margarita or a sour.

But a rut — no matter how comforting — can close you off from new possibilities. In this case, the mind-expanding novelty is using Angostura bitters as the main alcohol. Normally bitters are used — extremely sparingly — bring a bitter flavor to help balance out an otherwise sweet drink. Most of them, though, are suspended in a base that averages around 45 percent alcohol, or 90 proof. So, there is no reason why you couldn’t drink them in more substantial amounts.

1½ ounces Angostura bitters – you will probably want to use a knife to pry off the plastic cap that limits you to a dash of bitters at a time, or you’ll spend the next 15 minutes shaking your wrist to fill a jigger

½ ounce rye whiskey

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 ounce orgeat – this is a sweet almond syrup, usually used in tropical drink; here it is used to balance out the bitter herbiness from the bitters

Combine all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake it. At this point, you know how to do this.

Strain into a coupé or Nick & Nora glass.

Ask your digital assistant to play “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals.

Spend the next two and a half cocktails trying to identify what it is you’re tasting.

Probably the least useful word to describe this particular drink is “delicious.” It is actually delicious in fact — that’s not the issue. There’s a sweet, sherry-like, almost raisiny flavor that isn’t actually all that much like raisins or sherry. There’s a sweetness in the front end, but a bitter aftertaste that is nothing like dark chocolate or anything else you would call “bittersweet.” There are herbal notes from the Angostura — but not mint or rosemary, or any herb that you’re probably familiar with. You can try reading the label, but the Angostura Co. has kept their ingredients secret for over 200 years with the kind of secrecy usually reserved for nuclear codes.

So what are we left with?

Bittersweet fruitiness with herbs and the tiniest bit of rye in the background. This is the kind of cocktail you would drink with — OK, I don’t know what the day-to-day life of a monastic abbot is, but if he gets any vacation time and were to take a holiday in the Caribbean, this is what he would drink, wearing sandals, and a tropical shirt covered with pictures of little monks on it.

He would have checked into the hotel under the name Costello — a tiny, private joke that would make him smile to himself. The staff would greet him with fondness, and he would greet them by name in return.

At the bar by the pool, the bar manager would tap the young woman on duty on the shoulder and send her to wait on other customers, while he would mix this cocktail without needing to be told.

“Long flight?” he’d ask the abbot. “You look like you could use this.”

“Bless you, Leo,” the abbot would say, with a look of relieved fondness on his face. “You, sir, are a saint.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Leo would say.

zero-proof breakfast cocktail

In Ian Fleming’s 1960 short story “Risico” spy James Bond is supposed to meet with another agent in a hotel bar. Never having met him, he is supposed to be on the lookout for a man drinking a Brandy Alexander. In an interior monologue, Bond is impressed by this detail. It is such a feminine drink, he thinks, that a man will be able to be recognized much better than he would be by holding a newspaper folded in a particular way or wearing a specific flower in his lapel.

As with many of the opinions expressed by the literary James Bond, this one hasn’t aged particularly well. Aside from some antiquated gender norming, Flemming missed a golden — and in hindsight obvious — opportunity. Brandy Alexander is a classic name for a female character in a Bond piece. Brandy would be beautiful of course, with dark hair cut startlingly (for Bond at least) short. She’d have a musical laugh and flashing dark eyes, and be an expert poker player and gifted butterfly collector. She would also be Europe’s most notorious cat burglar and jewel thief.

In the movie version she would be played by Audrey Hepburn and would have her own theme song, written by Henry Mancini.

At the end of the story, Bond would find himself with an attaché case notably empty of jewels, and a cheeky note dabbed with Brandy’s perfume, shaking his head and staring at her sports car disappearing into the distance.

Regardless of all that, Friday, Jan. 31 is National Brandy Alexander day, and we should celebrate with a cocktail, if not an actual jewel theft.

Brandy Alexander

1½ ounces brandy – some pedants will say it should be cognac, or brandy from a particular monastery in the mountains of Latvia, but let’s face it: you’re mixing it with crème de cacao – you’re probably not looking for subtle nuances here

1 ounce crème de cacao

¼ teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder

1 ounce light cream or half & half

Ice

Combine the brandy, crème de cacao and cocoa powder in a cocktail shaker, and dry shake it for 30 seconds or so. This means without ice. The trouble-maker here is the cocoa powder. Cocoa is hydrophobic, meaning that it doesn’t like dissolving in water. If you tried to mix it with the other ingredients over ice, you’d end up with little clumps of cocoa stuck to the ice cubes, bringing the sophistication of the drink down by about 15 percent. If you shake it vigorously with liquor, however, it will mix in pretty well. Like many of us, it is easier to get along with after enthusiastic exposure to alcohol.

Add ice and cream to the mixture, and shake for another 30 seconds or so, then strain into a cocktail or coupe glass. If you judged your shaking right, there should be just a few tiny ice chips floating on the surface.

Ask your digital assistant to play the James Bond theme, and sip your Brandy Alexander to it. You won’t be sorry.

Unlike many cream-based cocktails, this isn’t overly sweet. There is some residual sweetness from the crème de cacao, but it is balanced by the bitterness of the cocoa powder and the richness of the cream. The brandy is able to stand proudly in the front of this jazz combo of a cocktail. It carries a caché of sophistication and inspires confidence.